Jessie Inchauspe loves graphs.
Instagram is very slow and very steady, she says.
There arent that many spikes.
Not that many spikeshappens to be the central aim of Inchauspes work.
She has built a career talking about the importance of keeping ones blood glucose levels relatively stable.
(Content warning: This article discusses diets and eating disorders.)
Eat your veggies before your carbs, for instance.
Have dessert after a meal rather than a sweet snack on its own.
Go for a walk after eating.
Take a shot of apple cider vinegar before a carb-heavy meal.
(That one sounds weird.
Its easy to grasp the difference.
Im not actually saying anything thats super groundbreaking, Inchauspe tells me.
Not everyone is in tune with their body, for a variety of reasons, she told me.
People want concrete tools to feel better than they do.
As one person put it to me: She seems to have cornered the rational market for normal people.
For some outspoken critics of diet culture, her approach is hitting the mark.
(Its currently the podcasts most-listened-to and most-shared episode of 2023.)
If anything I now eat more, and havent given up dessert.
Im just more thoughtful about the order in which I eat what I want to eat, intuitively.
Shes not dogmatic or fear mongering.
She doesnt use cult-like language.
Shes just breaking down the realities of not living a life of balance.
The amount of sugar in the food is unheard of anywhere else Ive ever lived.
Which leads to so many health issues down the line.
She educates without punishing or demonizing and I think thats great.
The book is more playful than her last one.
It includes, among other graphics, a fairy version of Inchauspe wearing kale-shaped wings.
(She calls her visual aesthetic the baby of Einstein and Kim Kardashian.)
But, she says, I dont see myself as an influencer.
I see myself as a teacher, and Instagram is one of my channels.
She avoids sharing her personal life online and turns down the brand partnerships and collaborations that come her way.
She doesnt trust scientific papers funded by corporations, after all.
Still, blood glucose management is of undeniable interest to the wellness community at the moment.
[Close to] 1 billion people in the world have jot down 2 diabetes or prediabetes.
I want to help those people, you know?
I thought I was so cool, Inchauspe says.
She became her own guinea pig, too.
I cured my brain fog and curbed my cravings.
When I woke up, I felt amazing.
Inchauspe started the Glucose Goddess Instagram account in April 2019.
By the end of the year, she had left her day job to pursue the project full time.
After a year and a half, though, Inchauspe was nearly out of money and ready to quit.
Not all of these questions are answerable, at least not to the satisfaction of Inchauspes followers.
To a certain extent, the ways that different foods affect blood glucose levels are generalizable.
But on a nitty-gritty level, blood glucose tends to be highly personal.
Maybe for you, bread is more of a problem than potatoes, she says.
We do see different people reacting to carbs differently.
Theyre absolutely not damaging to anyone.
The worst case scenario is that it wont help, but it wont make it worse, she says.
Perelman has seen the rise of public interest in blood glucose data firsthand.
(In her first book, Inchauspe calls the research groundbreaking.)
Everyday people were desperate to be a part of the study, which gave participants continuous glucose monitors.
Its a little window into one part of my body, and I can do something about it.
We get a lot of people who maybe traditional health care is not helping that well, says Collier.
Womens pain especially is minimized, and Black womens pain especially.
There are a lot of preexisting issues with the health care system that wellness culture is now capitalizing on.
She was back in Paris, where she lives when shes not in New York.
Inchauspe wasnt defensive; this is something shes thought about a lot.
This is a question I face every day.
Its a fine line, and I dont have the perfect answer.
The accusation that she was causing eating disorders used to send her into a tailspin.
Now she knows where she stands on that and why.
But its not enough to make me rethink everything.
